muse is a digital writing club where a new prompt is posted each week.
muse is a digital writing club where a new prompt is posted each week.
click on the washi tape to see the prompt + writing notes!
05/03/2024
all song echoes (all echo sung)
like furtive flowers unfurling
in tender reminiscence, spilled
over open canyon sound—
—like furtive flowers unfurling
behind locked bathrooms, prayers
over open canyon sound
seep into loneliness…
…behind locked bathroom prayers
a hand dips in the pool,
seeds into loneliness
the formal secret of its heart—
—this hand of mine dipped in the pool
in tender reminiscence spilled
the formal secret of its heart:
all song is echo, (all echo song.)
[04/03/2024] take time to explore different structures of whatever you like to write [26/02/2024] write about echoes, sound, and reverberation.
i combined two prompts into one because i do what i want :3
a pantoum is a poetic form derived from the Malay verse pantun which is a series of quatrains. the 2nd and 4th lines of the first stanza repeat as the 1st and 3rd lines of the second stanza, and so on. additionally you can have the 1st and 3rd line of the first quatrain come back as the 2nd and 4th line of the last stanza, resulting in a neat hermetic poem.
the idea of interwoven, repeating lines espouses the theme of echoes in such a cool metatextual way that i just had to write it (and totally not because i couldn't finish the echo prompt before the end of that week haha not at all)
there's the vague shape of an iambic tetrameter that settled towards the end there. it wasn't intentional, but i kept it cause it isn't too noticeable when read out loud.
inspirations/bgm: Echoes by Pink Floyd, the last stanza of Ode on a Grecian Urn by my boy Keats.
26/03/2024
irreversible: a glass—half-full, then—deliberately inched inched inched / over the precipice. you can only look with eyes half-full / of sadness. that smile is to you now as is to a bull / a crimson cloth. you either find apotheosis in red or die trying / to run run run from it. you are the heauton timoroumenos 1. / you are the venus broken in pieces prayed to in the mirror / mirror please broker a peace with me / your eyes wide open still you cannot see.
1: self tormentor in ancient greek.
[25/03/2024] try writing in the second person.
a short one this time. didn't clean it up too much, just wrote what came to mind.
inspirations: L'Héautontimorouménos by Baudelaire, Reflections by RS Thomas.
18/04/2024
glisten:
wistful clamor
(calm slow fruit)
thorns tilt, gleam
(molten starlight)
great still nights.
(starlight glisten)
[14/04/2024] write a piece that uses all or most of this pool of words: glisten, slow, starlight, fruit, molten, calm.
each line is an anagram of the words in the parentheses. fun, but definitely had to wrack my brain to come up with them!
27/07/2024
i.
like how under the hooves of a crimson stallion
are hidden smaller, bleeding horses,
each dagger-tip of the star begets illuminated suffering.
our hearts lie in deathly rows of duplication—
red horses against green grass,
yellow stars against red silk.
ii.
in the space between outstretched fingers
i found four generations under one roof;
the felled familial tree regrew out of the barrel of a gun
with the following carved within its rings:
a branch unfurling into new leaves
leaves no trace of past sins.
read the poem in its original page here.
[22/07/2024] explore how things break, branch, become fractals—where does the importance in repetition or breaking away from it lie?
inspired by my country of origin, China. I have some conflicting feelings about it, but no matter these feelings be love or hate, they are felt with pain. i felt that the fractal theme fit because it reminded me of generations: you resemble your ancestors because you share the same blood (self-similarity), yet each iteration strays further away from the original shape.
there are some references in the 2nd stanza that you may not recognise/understand:
Four Generations under One Roof (四世同堂) is a chinese idiom and a book by Lao She about the Japanese occupation of China/Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945).
“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” is a quote by Mao Zedong, also used in the context of the Sino-Japanese War as well as the Chinese Civil War (1927-1949).
The theme of this poem is quite personal; if you are interested in knowing more details or want to discuss the contents, feel free to email me.
